Curriculum Thought, Categories Of

Since its inception, the curriculum field has exemplified diverse perspectives or schools of thought. Several of the prominent category schemes have been developed by Herbert Kliebard, Michael [Page 271]Schiro, William Pinar, Elliot Eisner, John McNeil, William Watkins, and William Schubert, among others.

When the curriculum field emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was already a time of considerable diversity as delineated by curriculum historian, Kliebard. He identified four categories or interest groups that emerged to contend in what he called a crucible of curriculum reform efforts: humanists, developmentalists, social efficiency proponents, and social meliorists. The humanists, such as Charles Eliot and William Torrey Harris, advocated variations on a liberal arts and sciences curriculum, whereas develop-mentalists such as G. Stanley Hall saw the need for a psychology of curriculum that connected human development to the development of the human race throughout civilization. Thus, developmentalist roots were found in the Herbartians, who built on the cultural epoch theory of Johann Friedrich Herbart. The social efficiency interest group advocated from applications of science to curriculum making, finding proponents that ranged from a pediatrician (Joseph Mayer Rice) to educational psychologists and measurement advocates (e.g., James M. Cattell, E. L. Thorndike, Charles H. Judd) and efficiency-minded curriculum designers (Franklin Bobbitt, W. W. Charters), both of whom fell under the influence of time and motion studies advocated for efficiency in business and industry. This factory model of education associated with Frederick Taylor was contested by social meliorists, such as Lester Frank Ward, who saw curriculum as a basis for cooperation and democratic collaboration. Kliebard did not place the work of John Dewey in any one of these categories; instead, he saw Dewey as hovering among them, challenging them to eclectically blend the deepest and most profound dimensions of each for the productive benefit of learners and curricula that influenced them.

Sometimes, perhaps due to such unique placement of Dewey, progressive and traditional forms of education were seen as the two most prevalent categories of curriculum in the first half of the 20th century. These are the categories compared in the renowned Eight Year Study of high schools, the results of which were published in 1942, showing that progressive practices were equal or superior preparation for college.

Michael Schiro developed the following categories for curriculum ideologies based on the ways in which categories of philosophy of education were articulated: scholar academic, social efficiency, child study, and social reconstruction. Also drawing from philosophy, Robert Zais has shown that curricular positions can be traced to three orientations of philosophy: other worldly, earth centered, and man centered. Such categories or their synonyms have had a lasting effect; however, scholars engaged in the emergence of curriculum studies in the 1970s offered more specific categories, apart from the traditions of educational philosophy. Notably, Eisner and Pinar provided categories that helped shape the emergent movement of the field from sole focus on curriculum development to the study and understanding of curriculum as a social phenomenon. Categories of each of these curriculum theorists and their respective colleagues evolved over the years. For instance, in the early 1970s, Eisner with colleague and former student Elizabeth Vallance presented key work of notable scholars of the day that illustrated five conflicting conceptions of curriculum: cognitive processes, technology, self-actualization, social reconstruction, and academic rationalism. John McNeil has argued for similar categories in his widely used introductions to curriculum literature, beginning in 1978: humanistic, social reconstructionist, technology, and academic subjects. In several editions of The Educational Imagination, beginning in 1979, Eisner refined six curriculum ideologies, culminating in the following: religious orthodoxy, rational humanism, progressivism, critical theory, reconceptualism, and cognitive pluralism. Eisner often has expressed an intellectual debt to Schwab's distinction between theoretic and practical inquiry in curriculum and his advocacy of an eclectic position that Eisner in turn applies to the conflicting conceptions and ideologies he has delineated over the years, showing that at increased depth there exists complementarity along certain lines.

...